The "Middle East and Terrorism" Blog was created in order to supply information about the implication of Arab countries and Iran in terrorism all over the world. Most of the articles in the blog are the result of objective scientific research or articles written by senior journalists.

From the Ethics of the Fathers: "He [Rabbi Tarfon] used to say, it is not incumbent upon you to complete the task, but you are not exempt from undertaking it."

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Defending Ourselves to Death - Caroline Glick

Why, despite their good intentions, Israeli leaders are failing the country.

A week ago, Makor Rishon led
its weekend paper with a startling headline: “Following a long period
of desecration, a cemetery in the Sharon is being moved.” Moshav Hagor is located in the center of the country.
Successive IDF chiefs of General Staff, Lt. Gen. (ret.) Dan Halutz and
Lt. Gen. (ret.) Gabi Ashkenazy hail from the farming community
established in 1949 by veterans of the Palmach.

Along with
their neighbors in Moshav Yarchiv, for the past decade, the farmers of
Hagor have been subjected to the continuous desecration of their
communal cemetery by their Muslim neighbors from Jaljulia, a Muslim town
of ten thousand located between the two moshavim.

Adjacent to a school in Jaljulia, Hagor’s cemetery has been
subjected to abuse of all kinds. Residents regularly find animal
carcasses at the entrance to the cemetery. Garbage is routinely dumped
on graves. Human and other feces are frequently smeared across headstones. One night, all the headstones on all the graves at the cemetery were broken. Residents mourning their dead are harassed.
After a decade of constant abuse, Hagor’s residents despaired of ever
restoring the security to their cemetery and decided to take matters
into the own hands. With the halachic approval of then chief rabbi
Shlomo Amar, they built an alternative cemetery in another area of their
moshav. Families paid thousands of shekels to reinter their loved ones
at the new site. Today the only bodies remaining in their original
graves are the ones with no living relatives to pay to move them.

Several years ago, Moshav Yarchiv’s cemetery was rezoned to become a new neighborhood in Jaljulia. An attempt by Yarchiv’s residents to fence off the cemetery failed. The day after they installed the fence it was stolen.
The rabbinate has refused on halachic grounds to permit Yarchiv’s
residents to exhume and reinter their dead. But even if they had
rabbinic permission, they have nowhere else to bury them. Due to
bureaucratic hurdles, Yarchiv hasn’t been able to find an alternative
burial ground. Jaljulya once had good relations with its
Jewish neighbors. But over the past decade, the town has become a hotbed
for Islamic radicalism. Residents built a new massive mosque in the
town. Despite repeated complaints from their Jewish neighbors, the
mosque’s loudspeakers, which face Hagor, deliberately blast the call to
prayer in the middle of the night. Last October, Nedal Salah
of Jaljulia paraglided into Syria from the Golan Heights and joined
Islamic State. Following Salah’s action, the Shin Bet (Israel Security
Agency) discovered a cell of six more town residents who had transferred
their loyalties to Islamic State, which they intended to travel to
Syria to join. In the Makor Rishon report, Hagor’s farmers
voiced their despair at the failure of the government and its agencies
to protect them, their dead and their property from their Muslim
neighbors. “There is no law enforcement against criminals from Jaljulya,” one resident said angrily.
Former local council head David Cohen explained that protecting the
cemetery would have required the moshav to place a guard on site 24
hours a day. Hagor lacks the resources to take such action, or similar action to defend its fields. And so Jaljulya’s residents continue to assault their Jewish neighbors and spread feces on their graves.
Sunday morning, residents of Efrat awoke to the news that a terrorist
from a neighboring Palestinian enclave had infiltrated the community in
the middle of the night. At around 6 a.m. the terrorist, Baha al-din
Odeh, stabbed and moderately wounded an IDF officer. Efrat, a
suburban community of 10,000 residents, is the largest community in the
Etzion bloc south of Jerusalem. Unlike Hagor, Efrat is guarded heavily
by the municipality’s security department, financed by its residents. Among other things, the community has deployed security cameras all along its perimeters. The camera footage is monitored continuously.
When the terrorist approached the community just before 2 a.m. on
Sunday, the security department detected him and immediately notified
the IDF. The officer Odeh wounded Sunday morning was deployed to the
community with his soldiers to locate him. In a meeting
Sunday night with community members, Efrat Mayor Oded Revivi and Judea
Brigade Commander Col. Roman Gofman explained at length the concerted
actions taken in the early morning hours to protect the community’s
residents. Gofman acknowledged though that no matter how
hardened a community’s defenses may be, and how determined the IDF is to
defend it, a motivated terrorist will figure out a way to get inside. Last weekend, the IDF deployed an Iron Dome battery along the border with Syria for the first time. The move followed repeated mortar fire into Israel from the Syrian Golan.
Until now, military and civilian authorities viewed mortar rounds
falling on the Israeli side of the border as errant rounds. But after
three mortar rounds fell into Israel in two days, those same authorities
began worrying that Syrian government forces, fighting with their
Hezbollah and Iranian bosses may have decided to begin deliberately
bombing Israel. And so they deployed the Iron Dome battery.
To be sure, Israel faces different challenges in the Sharon around
Jaljulya, in the Bethlehem-Hebron area around Gush Etzion and in the
Golan Heights along the border with war-torn Syria. But Israel’s
responses to all these threats share a common, destructive feature. Israel’s strategies for defending its civilians in all three areas are overly reliant on defensive measures.
No one has the financial wherewithal to fortify cemeteries or
agricultural fields – which are regularly torched – with armed guards.
But vandals from Jaljulya aren’t vandalizing cemeteries, burning
fields and blasting their mosque loudspeakers because their Jewish
neighbors don’t have guards everywhere. They are taking these aggressive
actions because Israeli authorities are not making them stop.
It is the job of the government, the police and the courts to make
clear that crime doesn’t pay. It is their failure to drive home this
message consistently that empowers radicalized thugs from Jaljulya to
spread feces on Jewish graves. Likewise, the problem in Gush
Etzion isn’t that area communities haven’t taken the necessary steps to
protect their residents or that the IDF suffers from a manpower
shortage. The problem is that Palestinians in Odeh’s middle-class
community, which overlooks Efrat, and in surrounding villages feel free
to plan terrorist attacks against their Jewish neighbors as they sit in
their living rooms and watch genocidal broadcasts on Hezbollah, Hamas
and Fatah TV. As for the Golan Heights, sooner or later,
Hezbollah and Syrian government forces, along with their Iranian
overlords can be depended on to open a new front against Israel in the
Golan Heights if they become convinced that Israel’s main countermove
will be to permanently deploy a missile defense battery along the
border. Missile defense batteries don’t scare enemies away. They merely
challenge their ingenuity. No one doubts that the government
wants to defend Israel’s citizens – alive and deceased. But despite
their good intentions, our leaders are failing us. Our political,
military, police and bureaucratic leaders are failing us because our
foes – at home and abroad – have come to believe that we aren’t willing
to do what is necessary to defeat them. Our leaders are
failing us because they refuse to act on the sure knowledge that an
over-reliance on defensive measures does not deter aggression. It
invites aggression.

Caroline Glick is the Director of the David Horowitz Freedom Center's Israel Security
Project and the Senior Contributing Editor of The Jerusalem Post. For
more information on Ms. Glick's work, visit carolineglick.com. Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/264239/defending-ourselves-death-caroline-glick Follow Middle East and Terrorism on TwitterCopyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.